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    Pride Month 2024: An Abundance of Theater of All Stripes

    From Broadway to the city’s smaller stages, a flurry of shows with wide-ranging appeal, familiar faces and rising talent.American theater has long been more welcoming to queer lives and stories than Hollywood has been, so the abundance of shows during Pride Month is unsurprising. It’s also overwhelming — there is just so much to see.On Broadway, queer characters play central roles in productions as starkly different as “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album, and Paula Vogel’s autofictional “Mother Play,” starring Jessica Lange. In the Max Martin jukebox “& Juliet,” a romance involving Juliet’s nonbinary best friend makes up a sweet subplot.And of course, the gayest show of the year returns on June 26, when Cole Escola’s madcap comedy “Oh, Mary!” — about Mary Todd Lincoln’s secret life and aspirations — begins previews on Broadway after a popular run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. As Joshua Barone wrote in his review, “Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’”Cole Escola, left, as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” which is moving to Broadway after a run at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusannah Millonzi, left, and Purva Bedi in Bailey Williams’s “Coach Coach.”Maria BaranovaSave some money for the city’s smaller stages, though, because they are offering a flurry of shows for Pride Month and are where you can spot rising talent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: For ‘Molly Sweeney,’ Not Seeing Was Never the Obstacle

    The Irish Rep ends its season-long Brian Friel survey with the story of a blind woman who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight.Molly Sweeney can identify dozens of plants by touch, catch a lie in a familiar voice and dance ecstatically through a crowd without disturbing a hair. Because she lost much of her eyesight when she was 10 months old — except, crucially, her ability to discern light from dark — Molly has developed keen powers of sensory perception.Sure-footed though she is, the title character in “Molly Sweeney,” now running at the Irish Repertory Theater, is treated like a pawn by two men who can’t see beyond their own self-interests. That’s one of several conspicuous paradoxes explored in Brian Friel’s 1994 confessional drama, the final installment of the theater’s season devoted to the playwright’s work.Like Friel’s more often revived “Faith Healer,” “Molly Sweeney” is told through a series of monologues addressed to the audience. All three characters, who remain onstage throughout, narrate their subjective recollections of a six-month span (the year is unspecified; the setting is Ballybeg, Friel’s fictional Irish hamlet). But only one of them can speak with unbiased clarity on the central occurrence: what happened when a doctor tried to restore Molly’s sight.Friel’s extraordinary hand with vivid prose is especially evident in Molly’s version of events. Played with a poised sense of wonder by Sarah Street, Molly recalls relishing in the beautiful details of a world she had no need of seeing. The idea for an eye operation came from her husband Frank, played by John Keating with the frazzled intensity of a mad scientist. A dilettante prone to colorful tangents, he sees Molly as an object of fascination and a personal cause. Molly’s egocentric ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), considers her a potential miracle patient who might revive his career.Directed by Charlotte Moore, this production is faithful to the author’s stated preference for minimal staging (the program quotes Friel’s disinterest in “concept or interpretation”). That puts the focus squarely on the three actors, who do fine work illuminating Friel’s descriptive language, particularly Street and Keating as spouses who gravely misjudge each other. The performers are confined to their thirds of the stage, sparse but for a chair and window each (the set is by Charlie Corcoran), while mottled blue-and-violet lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) creates an impression of a developing field of vision.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Agreement’ and ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!,’ Two Irish Imports

    “Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: In ‘Aristocrats,’ an Irish Dynasty Confronts Reality

    A once-powerful clan gathers for a family wedding and muddles through the facts and fiction of their past and present.On a summer lawn outside Ballybeg Hall, the O’Donnell siblings loll under lemony sunlight perfect for a family reunion. A wedding has lured back two of the émigrés among them, but Claire, the bride-to-be, has always lived at home.Her intended is a local man, decades older, whom she does not love. A widower with young children he wants her to raise, he has promised her a car for Christmas, and days full of nothing to do. None of which matches the dreams she once had of channeling her musical talent into a performing career.“He’s buying a piano so that I can teach the children to play,” Claire says, the flatness of her voice the barest camouflage for her anguish. “Maybe one of them will become a concert pianist?”This is what the wan remnants of an Irish Catholic dynasty look like in Brian Friel’s play “Aristocrats,” set in the mid-1970s amid the tumbledown glamour of the O’Donnells’ grand old homestead, in the hills above Ballybeg, County Donegal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Review: In ‘Translations,’ What’s Lost When Language Is Looted

    An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.A drunken philosopher alights on what may be his pinnacle argument: That we are shaped not by the facts of history, but by our imagination of it. “We must never cease renewing those images,” he says, or we’ll stop living.That thirsty scholar is Hugh (Seán McGinley), who runs one of Ireland’s clandestine (and illegal) hedge-schools, teaching a rustic assembly of adult pupils out of his dilapidated shanty. “Translations,” from 1980, is the first play in the Friel Project, a season of three works at the Irish Repertory Theater. A modest yet exquisite revival directed by Doug Hughes, it makes a rigorous case not only for Brian Friel’s pre-eminence as an interpreter of Irish national identity, but for the vitality of art in deciphering life.It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage. A rebellion in 1798 led not to independence but to forced union with Britain in the United Kingdom. And now, British soldiers, including the listless romantic Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), are mapping the countryside and anglicizing Irish place-names. One of Hugh’s two sons, Owen (Seth Numrich), has become not just a translator, but a champion for the “King’s good English,” more enthused about the endeavor than even Yolland. The actors lend the fraternity between these young men an energy and curiosity that emphasizes the consequences of what they’re doing: renaming a homeland out from under its inhabitants’ feet.Yolland is the one who hesitates, though not on moral grounds: A hapless son of empire, he fetishizes feeling like an outsider, growing sweet on the sound of Irish vowels and even sweeter on Maire (Mary Wiseman), a milkmaid with her sights set on America. Their giddy, headlong infatuation is fueled by mutual incomprehension, before a sharp turn whose potentially tragic fallout Wiseman plays with affecting transparency.Friel’s shrewd spin on the pastoral drama is grounded in the convictions of these carefully drawn characters. But the play also confronts soaring questions about the nature of language — how it connects people to their homes (the trodden-earth set is by Charlie Corcoran) and to one another, and what happens when a native tongue is erased.Owen Campbell delivers a quieter register of heartbreak as Hugh’s humbler son, Manus, whose dream of preserving homegrown education, with Maire at his side, becomes another colonial casualty. Embodying extreme ends of the communicative spectrum are Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi), a presumed mute who struggles to articulate her name, and Jimmy Jack (John Keating), a disheveled bookworm who waxes at length in Greek and Latin about his crush on Athene, the goddess of wisdom.Dressed in clay-colored peasant garb by Alejo Vietti, and tenderly lit by Michael Gottlieb, each of these characters is illustrated with a Rembrandt-like specificity. As their portraits make clear, it’s essential to keep reimagining the plight of those consumed by imperial appetites. Doing so may lead to deeper understanding among us.TranslationsThrough Dec. 31 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    Searching for Brian Friel, and His Mythical Ballybeg

    Irish Repertory Theater’s season-long survey of the playwright’s work prompted our reporter to seek out the Irish town that inspired the imaginary site of so many of his plays.Up a steep and grassy windblown hill, in the top row of what’s known as the new graveyard, the playwright Brian Friel lies buried under a dark, glossy slab etched with an image of a St. Brigid’s cross, a traditional Irish symbol woven from rushes.This little cemetery in a remote northwest corner of Ireland has a sweeping view of valley, hills and tiny town: Glenties, County Donegal, which in a way is a curious choice for Friel’s final resting place. It isn’t where he was born, in 1929; that was Omagh, across the nearby border with Northern Ireland. It isn’t where he died, in 2015; that was Greencastle, quite a bit farther north in County Donegal, on the sea.But it is, arguably, a place he spent a lot of time in his head. Glenties (population 927 in 2022) is his mother’s hometown, where he would go during childhood summers. Not a son of the town but a grandson, he became, as the New York Times critic Mel Gussow asserted in a 1991 profile, “a writer on a level with Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge,” two of the most esteemed Irish playwrights in the canon.What claim to fame Glenties has, and what brush with Hollywood, is because of Friel. In his writing, he transformed it into a place called Ballybeg: the site of many of his plays, including the most famous, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), which is inspired by his mother and aunts, and dedicated “In memory of those five brave Glenties women.”At St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history around the corner from Main Street, material about Friel includes news clippings of his funeral and old show posters.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe grave of the Irish playwright Brian Friel overlooks the western Irish town of Glenties.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOff Broadway this season, Irish Repertory Theater’s Friel Project will revive three of his Ballybeg plays, starting with “Translations” (1980), about a 19th-century British colonialist project to Anglicize Ireland, directed by the Tony Award winner Doug Hughes and running through Dec. 3. It will be followed in January by “Aristocrats” (1979), set amid a once-grand Catholic family in Chekhovian decline, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director; and in March by “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964), in which a young man prepares to leave Ballybeg for the United States, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director.After Friel died, the critic Michael Billington called him “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation,” citing a body of work that examined “exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland [and] the subjective nature of memory.” All of it, he pronounced, was “bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theater and his breadth of understanding.”In a phone interview, O’Reilly said that “if there was such a thing as a poet laureate of the Irish Rep, it would be Brian Friel”: an intellectually curious, deeply empathetic playwright who probed the makeup of Irish identity. As profoundly as Friel fathomed small-town Irish life, he also recognized the urge to escape it — or in O’Reilly’s words: “Let me get the hell out.”“In so many of his plays, it’s about the departure from it and the need to break beyond it,” said O’Reilly, who was 19 when he left his hometown, even tinier than Glenties, in County Cavan.A current view of Main Street, which is pocked with vacant storefronts.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA photograph on display at St. Connell’s Museum shows Main Street in 1912.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOf course, the true Ballybeg — whose name in Irish, Baile Beag, means “small town” — exists only in Friel’s plays. Still, you can hear echoes of Glenties in those plays, and echoes of those plays in Glenties.And if you go there looking for him, as I did in late September, you will find him — even if the post office where his mother is said to have worked is long gone, succeeded by a branch tucked efficiently inside the Costcutter supermarket, on an unbusy Main Street pocked with vacant storefronts.I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast at one end of the road, near the electric vehicle charging point that communicates loud and clear that Glenties is a 21st-century town. At the other is a hotel whose website commemorates the occasion, 25 years ago, when Meryl Streep, star of the film adaptation of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” slept there “on the night of the local premiere.” In between, a creative arts center and a gift shop both have Lughnasa — “the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh,” as the narrator of Friel’s play explains, and a harvest festival — in their names.With a dozen Broadway productions in his lifetime, most of them Ballybeg plays (including “Faith Healer,” from 1979, in which a pivotal, sinister event occurs on the outskirts of town), Friel was not given to sentimentalizing rusticity.A peat bog in the hills and mountains surrounding the town.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesBut outsiders have a tendency in that direction, as a Ballybeg woman says in Friel’s comedy “The Communication Cord” (1982): “You know the way strangers get queer notions about a place like this; and foreigners is the worst.”Yet when a visitor remarks, in “Give Me Your Answer, Do!” (1997), “The view up that valley is breathtaking,” he could easily be talking about Glenties, whose name in Irish, Na Gleannta, means “the glens.”The town has stunning vistas of the Blue Stack Mountains that hem it in — and make driving there from Dublin, as I did, an adventure, fraught with the risk of toppling off some narrow, winding road into a patch of gorgeous scenery.Phillip Rodgers, owner of Roddy’s Bar, shares a drink with his patrons.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA 2008 photo of the “The Laurels,” the old family home where Friel’s grandparents, mother and aunts once lived. Mary Ita BoyleA local resident sells bread at a weekly street market.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesFOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, starting in the 1890s, a railway stopped in Glenties. I learned that at St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history just around the corner from Main Street. Its collection of Friel material tends toward news clippings (more Meryl) and old show posters (like the one that informs you that both Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea were in the original cast of “Translations,” in Derry).There is also the text of a cheeky piece that Friel wrote for The Irish Times in 1959, ribbing Glenties for its second consecutive win of the national Tidy Towns contest. “My mother’s people were MacLoones,” he notes, wryly claiming “direct descent” from that “mecca of tidiness.”An early-20th-century photograph at St. Connell’s Museum shows a train traveling in western Ireland.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe family home was not far from where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather was the station master.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe cottage where the family lived, the home of the impecunious sisters who inspired “Dancing at Lughnasa,” is in Glenties — close to where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather had been the station master. The Brian Friel Trust, which reportedly has plans for a cultural center elsewhere in town, owns the house.From the road, the path to the old family home passes under a low canopy of branches. Then, in a clearing, there it is, looking grimy and forlorn, with moss-carpeted stairs and a gold-lettered plaque beside the door. “‘The Laurels,’” it says, which is the house’s name. “Unveiled by Brian Friel, Meryl Streep and Sophie Thompson. 24th September 1998.”Sheep are free to graze the rolling hills.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAnd this is where the soft glow of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a memory play set in imaginary Ballybeg in 1936, collides hard with a reality that is too earthbound, too bleak, too untouched by poetry. But also — maybe because of the plaque, and the gloom — more like an exhibit than a remnant of history.“Translations” (in which, somewhat mind-bendingly, a character from Ballybeg mentions Glenties in conversation) takes place a century earlier, in 1833, as the British are mapping all of Ireland and rewriting every Irish place name into English. It’s more than a decade before the Great Famine, but jobs are scarce — a theme that runs through Friel’s plays — and a fear of blighted crops is making some locals nervous.“Sweet God,” another scoffs in response, “did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never!”If you go simply by the sign on Main Street in Glenties, with its arrow pointing vaguely north, you will never find the town’s famine graveyard. If you consult Google Maps, it will tell you that the place is “temporarily closed.” Not so.The famine graveyard has a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMichael, who now lives in Australia, was visiting family in Glenties. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesWhen I pulled up behind the group of houses where my GPS said it was, a man in a purple sweater instantly emerged to find out why I was there. Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. Down the hill, sheep were grazing.The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. Sickness spread among the desperate poor at the Glenties workhouse. Inmates who perished were interred out back.So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.I got back in the car and headed to the Atlantic Ocean, about eight miles away, where the island of Inishkeel and its medieval monastic ruins lie not far across the water from Narin/Portnoo Beach. At low tide, you can walk to it on an exposed sandbar, but you will need to keep careful watch of the time if you don’t want to get trapped there, and heed a sign, fixed to a gate on the island, that warns, surreally: “Beware of the bull.” (I saw no bull.)The island of Inisheel in the distance. A sandbar that is exposed during low tide connects Narin/Portnoo Beach and Inishkeel.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThere is a wildness and a timelessness to Inishkeel. A rugged desolation, too, even though all you have to do is face the far shore to see the houses on the mainland, and wind turbines spinning in the hills beyond: a side-by-side coexistence of the eerie ancient and the unsettled now that is very Friel.Glenties doesn’t have a coastline, but Ballybeg does, with at least one island off it: in “The Gentle Island” (1971), called Inishkeen; in “Wonderful Tennessee” (1993), called Oilean Draiochta, which is translated in the play as Island of Mystery. Neither island is tidal like Inishkeel — you need a boat to get to them — but each shares a bit of the real island’s past.In those plays, Friel taps into the primal, the mythic, the spiritual. And maybe it was just the gray and chill the day I was there, and the tiny needles of rain that stung my face. But on that marvelous, rock-strewn island, all of those forces seemed entirely conjurable — somewhere off beautiful Ballybeg, County Donegal. More

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    Review: In ‘The Saviour,’ Past Trauma Is Very Much Present

    The gravitational pull of the hurts of yesteryear is on vivid display in Deirdre Kinahan’s drama at Irish Repertory Theater.Back stories can be dangerous things. A character besotted with them — especially reductive trauma-filled ones — colludes in her own miniaturization.That’s the case with Máire Sullivan, the central character of Deirdre Kinahan’s “The Saviour,” a two-character drama that is receiving its world stage premiere at Irish Repertory Theater. Propped up in bed on her 67th birthday, a languorous Máire (the lauded Marie Mullen, who originated the role in an online production of the play in 2021) enjoys a postcoital smoke as she waits for her lover to bring her a cup of coffee.Ciarán Bagnall’s set, with its chalky walls and dusty windows, suggests a room that hasn’t been aired out in years. It’s a fitting milieu for a woman who cultivates mental cobwebs. Even the “volcanic” sex she’s just had sends her mind hurtling to the past; addressing her confidences to Jesus, Máire, a devout Catholic, describes how sex was previously “foisted on me when I didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace.”From there, clues pointing to a traumatic episode pile up. After her mother died when she was a young girl, Máire was sent to a Magdalene laundry, a “reformatory for whores and hussies,” as she describes it. These laundries, operated by Catholic religious orders and propped up with state funding, incarcerated thousands of Irish girls and women as late as 1996. Máire recounts the monotony of the work, the suffocating silence imposed on the “forgotten girls,” and the unmourned death of a friend who dropped “dead in the steam.” Such reminiscences, though chilling, seem both overly contrived and overly familiar when spatchcocked together, departing little from abused-children narratives handed down by Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.Even working with a script that leans too much on exposition, the galvanic Mullen shows impressive range, channeling Molly Bloom in a fist-pumping soliloquy about having sex as a sexagenarian one minute, chiding herself for “acting ridiculous” the next. When her son Mel (a guarded Jamie O’Neill) shows up to deliver some disturbing news about her lover, she unleashes a biblical wave of fury on him.Alas, for both these characters, the past is like a heavy fog that never lifts. (Mel hints darkly that Máire was an emotionally absent mother, frequently subject to dark moods, and even hit one of her children.) The gift that Mel brings for Máire’s birthday — a doll wearing a yellow dress with pink roses — is a throwback to a toy that the nuns at the Stanhope Street laundry snatched from her as a young girl. But even a seemingly heartfelt gift meant to restore something of the life that was taken from Máire is ultimately used as a weapon against Mel.As the play ends, Máire and her son, whose homosexuality she can’t bring herself to reconcile with her faith, are at an impasse. Under Louise Lowe’s direction, mother and son stand on opposite sides of a wall facing the audience, underscoring their estrangement, as Mel offers a moving reflection of a rare moment in his childhood when “Jesus left us a bit of room.” For all of Máire’s religious fervor, the continual resurfacing of trauma is the bigger issue. It exerts the gravitational pull of a black hole that sucks everything in and gives nothing back.The SaviourThrough Aug. 13 at Irish Rep, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    ‘The Smuggler’ Review: A Barman’s Rambling Yarn

    The one-man show means to draw the audience into a moral quandary pitting immigrants and the American poor against each other.“I am/An Amerikan,” says Tim Finnegan, the Irish bartender-cum-storyteller in Ronán Noone’s “The Smuggler: A Thriller in Verse.” “Worked hard to be/A citizan,” he continues in a Dublin accent, the words purposely misspelled in the script. He cheekily punches the last syllables, emphasizing what the play’s subtitle already warned us about: We’re seeing a thriller in rhyme.This is the tone that this unkempt play, produced by the Irish Repertory Theater, strikes throughout: pat, masquerading as playful.It’s 2023, in a bar in an affluent Massachusetts community. Tim’s serving up drinks while telling us his story. He needed money for his family: his ever-exasperated wife and their ill toddler. Desperate, Tim found an untapped market to exploit: the homes of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are involved with lucrative illegal enterprises like human smuggling. Defending himself with weak arguments about moral subjectivity and telling us he’s just a good guy in tough circumstances, perhaps even a kind of Robin Hood, Tim says he robbed the immigrants for the down payment on a new home.Some other things happen: a car crash, a toppled tree, a beating, a murder, though many serve as diversions that needlessly overextend the storytelling. (A bonkers basement battle with a herculean rat, however, is the most suspenseful, and comical, portion of the play, in part because it’s so random.)“The Smuggler,” a one-man show, means to draw the audience into a moral quandary about Tim’s actions and the unfair status of immigrants and the citizen have-nots of America. But the play never demonstrates enough of Tim’s character to make him an interesting figure. Nor does it indicate it has a nuanced political statement — just transparent generalizations meant to be wise aphorisms about the American dream. (“You do what you need to do/To become what you want/To be.”)Michael Mellamphy is affable enough as Tim, like a regular about town, but he’s neither as charming nor as menacing as his narration would have us believe. Under Conor Bagley’s awkward direction, Mellamphy especially struggles in the transitions between scenes and characters: the accents muddled, the gestures, postures and voices forced. His movements around the space — circling, pacing around the bar — are more choreographed than natural.The immersive set design, by Ann Beyersdorfer at the intimate W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, provides color and detail. The walls of the theater are littered with quintessential Irish dive décor: ships, anchors, Irish flags. (“The Smuggler,” which won the 2019 best playwright award at New York’s 1st Irish Festival, was also staged in Washington, D.C., that year in an actual bar.)The play is loaded with “cheap” rhymes — as Noone himself describes them in his script — questionable metaphors, odd meter and endless nudge-and-winks to the form (“And maybe at this point/You’re getting bored/With the exposition”). Still, “The Smuggler” has more issues than how violently it strong-arms the word “hyperbole” into an exact rhyme with “today.” (And that’s very violently, by the way.) The play has several glaring blind spots: The few women mentioned are unlikable, often nags, and the various brown immigrants all seem to be criminals, primarily because the playwright has failed to engage with the deeper issues of gender or race.If “The Smuggler” aims to be about the price of the American dream and the moral cost of being a successful American citizen, it takes more than a few measures of doggerel from a black-market bartender to do so.The SmugglerThrough Feb. 26 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More